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Friday, October 26, 2007

Girl's Night Out Part Two

Where's Part One, you ask? That will have to come another time. Today, I'll write about my night out with the girls.

The girls being my four year old and nine year old daughters.

Tim is out and about tonight, on boy's night out. Who knows what the hell kind of trouble those guys will be doing...ARE doing...tonight. Quite honestly, I really don't want to know.

But since they were out and I would be home with the girls, I decided to take them out on a date.

I tried to figure out a nice place to take them, nothing too upscale, but not a chili's type place either. I want these girls to know what good food is really like.

So I picked Prime Only. Yes, the same restaurant that had the flies buzzing around me...I wrote about that experience in this post.

This time, I picked the location on Strickland, since it's closer to my home. I looked at their website, perused the menu, and e-mailed them about whether there was a children's menu. I got a quick reply from the manager with a children's menu attached. I thought that was great service so I decided to make reservations.

This was maybe three or four days ago. I made them through Open Table for three. I mentioned in the reservation that I would have two young girls, my daughters, joining me.

When we got to the place, we walked in through the wrong door. Hmmm...bad design. I had to ask how to get to the front of the restaurant and was 'escorted' through the dining room. Ummm, that's really _bad_.

After getting to the "front", the hostess asked if we were looking to be seated. I told her that I had a reservation for three at 7:15 and gave her my name. The look of panic hit her face. She was looking at the computer screen, then her table layout, then the computer screen, then the layout. Then she said she had to go talk to her manager and brought the table layout with her.

We waited in the not-really-there-foyer. Mind you, we spent about 20 minutes putting make-up on. We spent 20 minutes getting our outfits picked out. We spent three days getting excited about this date. And the girls spent about two hours squealing about this date.

And here we are, standing around, waiting... After about, I don't know how many minutes, five maybe? I start getting pissed. Goddammit, I made reservations. I saw empty tables. WTF am I kept waiting?

Fortunately, my daughters are oblivious. But I probably should have just went somewhere else because I just couldn't get past the negative things of the evening.

The food was good. The waitress was fine. But I felt very slighted and I wasn't sure if it was because I had two young children with me.

In my mind, my warped, selfish, egotistical mind, I would have thought people would have been endeared to us -- three ladies out on the town. Nope. None of that.

But the slights? Well, number one, I wasn't given the specials for the evening. I heard other tables get the specials. I had to ask our waitress for them. She quickly went through them and I later found out she omitted at least one of the specials.

Another slight was not getting any bread. I mentioned it to CJ and she was like "oh well". Good thinking. I knew I was making too much of it in my head.

It just wasn't a feeling of polish for me. The waitress was nice enough. I couldn't tell if maybe she was just not a great waitress, or if she was not happy with us.

But I am a good table. We order two appetizers -- I order the most expensive too. Oysters Rockefeller. Oh, and cheese fries for the kids. I thought that was cute when I ordered it, but no laughter from my waitress.

I order a glass of wine, a lemonade and a shirley temple.

Then we order meals and I get a damn piece of prime rib.

After all that, we share a piece of dessert.

How's that for a good table? And yet, I felt like I was intruding.

It didn't ruin the evening. At some point, I decided to screw being ms. polite/nice guy...because I am. Instead, I had fun with my girls. We giggled over silly pictures. Mia took pictures of everything and everyone. Then we filmed her singing and giggled over that. I got loose over 'just okay' service.

I paid the grossly overpriced bill and decided, you know, I gave it good effort but It's Prime Only? Sayonara. Me and my ladies will NOT be re-visiting this spot, nor the other, ever.

1 comment:

And you wonder why your BP is so high ;-). We went there a while ago and while the food was good, I didn't like the everything ala carte method of ordering and our waiter was kinda snooty as well. Here's a few words of advise from some bumper stickers that might help.

1. Don't sweat the small stuff2. Give me courage to accept the things I can't change and to work to change the things I can